The Warsaw Anagrams (12 page)

‘No, thank you. If I had any vodka, I’d fall right to sleep.’

He laughed sweetly. ‘Still, you should have a smidgen.’ He held his thumb and index finger an inch apart to indicate how much – the gesture of a man used to coaxing children to take their medicine. ‘It’ll help you relax,’ he added. ‘And keep you warm.’

Why are you being so nice to me
? I wanted to ask. It should have been obvious to me that everyone sensed that I was barely hanging on, but it wasn’t.

‘I’ll have a drink in a little while,’ I told him.

Sitting down again, he took an amethyst-coloured shot glass from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured himself a drink. After gulping it down, he licked his lips like a cat. Added to his kindness, the intimacy of that gesture – as if we’d been friends for ages – undid me. ‘Please help me, Mikael,’ I pleaded, and hearing my suffocating tone of voice made me want to run.

‘Listen, Erik, I’ll help you any way that I can, but I can’t tell you why the girl in your photograph came to me – at least, not precisely. I promised her that what we discussed would be kept secret, which is why I didn’t keep a file on her. All I can really tell you is that she had a problem for which she needed a physician’s help.’

‘Did her mother know what was wrong with her?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘Was she very ill?’

‘Erik,’ he said gravely, pressing his palms together in a beseeching manner, ‘don’t make me lie to you.’

‘She was very thin – her mother said she’d stopped eating. But maybe she couldn’t eat because of dysentery. Was that it?’

‘Erik, please stop!’

Despite Mikael’s plea, speculations as to the source of Anna’s troubles kept scattering through my head, though nearly all of them seemed ridiculously improbable. I even imagined that she was being slowly poisoned.

‘Could she have gotten pregnant?’ I finally asked. ‘Was that why she was so desperate?’

‘No,’ he replied sourly.

He took a long puff on his cigar, then picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. His gestures were quick and sure – the movements of a confident man who practised a valued profession, and whose grandchild was still alive.

I slapped his desk. ‘Damn it! Someone must have known what was wrong with her! Please, Mikael, the Nazis cut off her hand!’

I knew I was making a scene, but I couldn’t help myself. I wished I hadn’t ever given him my real name; having a false identity would have enabled me to plead more desperately – or even threaten him.

Shaken, the physician put on his spectacles and refilled his glass slowly.

‘Just tell me if she said anything about my nephew. I’ve a right to know that.’

He looked up, astonished. ‘So they knew each other?’ he asked.

‘I can’t be sure. Though there’s one link between them – the chorus.’

‘I see what you mean. But in that case, Rowy would be the person to talk to.’

A knock on the door interrupted us. It was Mikael’s nurse. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ll be going, Dr Tengmann,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Anka. Goodnight.’

‘Have a good evening, Dr Cohen,’ she added.

‘Thank you – and thanks for the tea,’ I told her.

After the door was closed, I faced Mikael again. ‘Rowy assured me that Anna never spoke of Adam to him. And my nephew never mentioned the girl to me.’

‘So it seems we’re at a dead end.’

He downed his second vodka, then pressed a troubled hand to his brow.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Just a momentary … what? I don’t know how to describe it.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Despair comes to me when I least expect it. It’s as if I’m in mourning.’

‘For whom, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘That’s just it – I don’t know.’ He showed me a surprised look. ‘It’s like a new form of grief – for nothing and everything at the same time. I don’t know any word for it.’ He shook his head, displeased with himself. ‘Though I have no right to talk of grief in front of you. I’m sorry.’

I saw I’d misjudged him; Adam was very much on his mind. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ I told him. ‘I’m grateful for your sensitivity to my feelings. And I realize you won’t reveal any more about Anna than you’ve already told me, but do you know of anyone else who might be aware of what was wrong with her?’

‘I’m afraid the girl hardly told me anything about her life. And now …’ He took a second amethyst-coloured shot glass from his desk drawer and poured me a drink.

When I knocked back the vodka in one go, Mikael grinned in admiration.

‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Few subjects could be less important than how I feel,’ I replied, choosing honesty over politeness. ‘But thank you just the same.’

Before leaving, Mikael handed me Adam’s file. In his precise handwriting, in German, the physician had written: ‘Excellent reflexes. Alert. No signs of any disease, but needs to put on weight!!!’

I’ll never forget those three exclamation marks.

He had also written
APPROVED FOR THE CHORUS
in big letters.

I searched the page for a statistic I’d wanted to check and found it scribbled near the bottom. Adam had been four feet one and three-quarters of an inch in height at the end of November 1940, a quarter of an inch shorter than the measurement I’d recorded for him two weeks prior to that date.

In my mind, I saw myself tilting my pencil in a favourable direction; I hadn’t realized I’d cheated.

‘You can keep it if you want,’ Mikael told me, and when I looked up to thank him, I discovered his eyes were moist. ‘Adam was beautiful,’ he told me.

I was back on the street when I heard my name called. Anka, Dr Tengmann’s nurse, came hurrying towards me, her determined face wrapped tightly in a white headscarf.

‘I could lose my job for this,’ she told me in a rushed voice, ‘but that girl, Anna, she never came to the office – at least not while I was here. And we kept no file on her. Ask yourself why!’

‘But Mikael said that was because …’

Before I could say anything more, Anka turned and hurried away. She looked back at me once over her shoulder. I didn’t see fear, as I’d expected. I saw anger.

Before going home, I went to speak to Dorota. Clutching a floral shawl tightly over her shoulders, she tiptoed out into the hallway to speak to me. ‘I’m sorry, but my husband won’t let anyone come in,’ she whispered.

I explained what I’d learned from Mikael.

Dorota shook her head sceptically. ‘Anna refused to discuss her health with anyone. I can’t believe she would have spoken to him or any other stranger.’

‘So why would Mikael make up a visit from her?’

‘I don’t know.’

When I asked for a list of Anna’s closest friends, along with their addresses, she slipped back inside to fulfil my request. A minute or so later, she slid an envelope under the door.

Dorota had written down two names in her precise script. Both lived across town in the Little Ghetto. I looked at my watch – ten minutes to seven. I’d have to return home to make supper. There wouldn’t be enough time before curfew to question Anna’s friends that evening.

On returning to Stefa’s flat, I discovered that the ghetto health service had sprayed carbolic acid on everything except her bed, since she hadn’t force enough in her coat-hanger arms to get up by herself and had adamantly refused assistance. I found her forehead burning. Her feet, however, were ice. As I covered them with an extra blanket, she said, ‘No, don’t, I have to wash Adam’s white shirt in the tub. Help me stand up.’

‘Why would you need to wash his shirt?’ I asked.

‘He’s being photographed in the morning.’

‘What are you talking about?’

From deep inside the delusion that had overwhelmed her, she replied, ‘All the kids are being photographed for the start of school.’

Offering her the truth at that moment might threaten her fragile stability, so I told her that she was far too ill to do any washing, and that if I got Adam’s white shirt wet now it wouldn’t be dry by morning. ‘But he has other nice shirts he can wear,’ I added, trying to sound cheerful. ‘I’ll iron one after supper.’ I intended to do just that if it would calm her.

‘You’re a bastard!’ she snapped.

‘Stefa, please don’t say that. I’m doing my best.’

‘But you’re always criticizing me!’

Being thought of as an unfair uncle made me frantic, so I took the shirt she wanted out of the hamper in my room. When I brought it to her, she fought to sit up.

‘For the love of God, stay put!’ I ordered. ‘I’ll wash it right after supper.’

She began to cry in silence. Sitting down beside her, I told her I’d hang the wet shirt next to the heater in my room so it would be dry by morning. ‘Don’t worry – Adam will look like a prince for his photo.’

She gazed away. Her lips moved, and twice she mouthed her son’s name. I imagined she was doing calculations about her own life and had discovered that nothing she could do in the future would ever even add up to zero.

‘Stefa,’ I began, but I couldn’t finish my sentence; I couldn’t think of how to phrase my wishes for us without seeming to betray the depth of our grief.

I sat alone at the kitchen table, feeling as though the walls of the room might collapse on me – and that it would be a fitting end. Then I practised Erik Honec’s signature until I settled on a highly ornamented script, with aristocratic flourishes on the E and the H.

The very movement of my hands gave me solace. It meant:
I still have options.

At 7.30, Ewa arrived with Helena in order to check on Stefa before curfew. I had only just started on my cabbage and potato-skin soup, and all the people I needed to interview about Adam’s death crowded in upon me as I stood over the stove. Helena stayed with me while Ewa talked to my niece. At the kitchen table, the little girl drew jagged pictures of needle-nosed aeroplanes flying over Warsaw. She told me they were Russian bombers. The city – a confusion of steeples and towers – was empty of people.

‘But where is everyone?’ I asked, fearing they’d been killed.

‘On vacation,’ she replied. ‘It’s summer.’ She pointed to the big yellow sun at the top of her drawing.

I smiled at her, grateful for the warm days and nights in her imagination.

My niece must have told Ewa the nature of her quarrel with me; on hearing the taps in the bathroom running, Helena and I went in and discovered Ewa washing Adam’s shirt in the bathtub. She hung it on a cord we strung across my room.

At just before eight, Ewa kissed me goodnight and led Helena to the door. I tried to give her money for a rickshaw – one of the bicycles mounted with a seat in front that had become common on our island by then – but she refused.

I propped Stefa up with pillows and spooned soup into her mouth, but she ate with inner-turned eyes and said nothing to me.

Then – God knows why – I sat at my desk and wrote a list of all the people I had known who were dead, starting with Adam and Hannah. I counted them when I was done: twenty-five. I spent another hour working on the list and came up with two more. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

Only then did I remember that my mother became a frenzied list-maker after my younger brother was born. Papa and I would find her numbered inventories everywhere around the house. Years later, I asked her about it, and she told me it was the only way she could keep her head above the high water of having two children to raise.

On a whim, I inserted
Erik Honec
after my mother’s name, and it was a relief to see my alter ego there; it meant I would escape the ghetto one way or another.

I settled into Stefa’s armchair for the night. She stirred only once, some time after midnight, needing to pee, and her fever was down a little in the morning. She thanked me in a strong voice when I handed her a cup of hot tea sweetened with molasses and the sugar crystal I’d saved. I felt she’d returned home and kissed her cheek in welcome. After smearing rhubarb jam on her toast, I fed her pieces on the end of a fork. She joked about my aristocratic table manners, which seemed a very good sign, but while I was in the kitchen making myself some ersatz coffee, she called out, ‘Is Adam’s shirt dry yet?’

I went in to her. Maybe something in my expression reminded her of the truth; her eyes opened wide in horror and she brought her hands to her mouth.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she whispered timidly.

‘Let’s talk,’ I said, rubbing her feet through the covers. ‘You’ll tell me whatever you want, and I’ll make no judgements. I promise.’

I made that vow because I couldn’t bear the thought of being remembered as an unfair uncle after I was gone.

‘No,’ she told me firmly. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

I stood up and retreated to the kitchen. There was a knock on the door while I was staring mindlessly into my coffee. I found Wolfi, Feivel and Sarah looking up at me from the landing. Their little faces were fearful; I suppose they thought that Adam’s death might have turned me against them.

‘Hello, Dr Cohen, we … we came to see Gloria,’ Feivel told me hesitantly.

‘She’s not doing so good,’ I replied. ‘But you can come in and feed her if you like.’

While Feivel and Wolfi spilled seeds into her dish, Sarah carried the budgie’s water cup back from the sink in both her hands, determined not to spill a drop. Her clenched determination gave me an idea.

‘Maybe one of you could adopt Gloria,’ I suggested. ‘Adam would want that.’

Wolfi said, ‘My dad hates pets. And he says birds shit all the time.’

Feivel gazed down, swirling his foot. Sarah bit her lip, looking as if she wanted to dash away.

‘Forget what I said,’ I told them. ‘I was being thoughtless.’

‘No, I’ll take her!’ Feivel announced, and he nodded hard when I looked at him, as if to convince us both.

As the two boys carried the cage downstairs, Sarah looked back at me for a moment, as though to fix me and the apartment in her memory, and I realized – with despair clutching at me – that I’d never see her or any of Adam’s other friends ever again.